Lincoln Yards: Shut down City Hall's conveyor belt

Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune

Ald. Michele Smith, left, advocates for more time to look over the Lincoln Yards proposal as Ald. Scott Waguespack, center, and Ald. Brian Hopkins, right, listen during a Chicago Plan Commission meeting at City Hall on Jan. 24, 2019.

Ald. Michele Smith, left, advocates for more time to look over the Lincoln Yards proposal as Ald. Scott Waguespack, center, and Ald. Brian Hopkins, right, listen during a Chicago Plan Commission meeting at City Hall on Jan. 24, 2019. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

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With Rahm Emanuel approaching his final days as mayor, the City Hall Approval Assembly Line is oiled up and rolling. Next on the conveyor belt: Developer Sterling Bay’s massive Lincoln Yards project for the North Side.

That puts Lincoln Yards on a fast track toward approval from the City Council’s Zoning and Finance committees, the city’s Community Development Commission and ultimately a council rubber-stamp of the project before Emanuel leaves office in May.

Anyone have a crowbar we can shove into the conveyor belt’s gears?

We have acknowledged and admired the project’s upside. Lincoln Yards is expected to generate as many as 23,000 new jobs and trigger the reconfiguration of a traffic nightmare, the Elston-Armitage-Ashland intersection. It’s a project with enough heft to transform not just the North Side but all of Chicago.

But we have had — and still have — a problem with the speed with which Emanuel and the local alderman, Brian Hopkins, 2nd, are trying to ramrod the project through City Hall. They want to get Lincoln Yards in the books before the next mayor and council arrive.

That would deprive North Siders their say about Sterling Bay’s latest iteration of blueprints for Lincoln Yards. To its credit, Sterling Bay has reshaped aspects of the project in reaction to community outcry. Residents saw no need for a 20,000-seat soccer stadium for a minor league team, as well as a sprawling entertainment district that would have threatened the viability of local music clubs. Sterling Bay cut those elements from its plan. Residents also wanted more open space, and the developer gave in, proposing an 11.2-acre park where the stadium would have gone.

But Sterling Bay’s third draft of the project still has problems. North Siders remain wary of the scale envisioned for Lincoln Yards’ towers, with heights as tall as 50 stories. There are still unanswered questions about how the infusion of density — the latest draft actually adds more than 2 million square feet of development — will affect traffic flow in already congested neighborhoods.

A proposed tax increment financing district would pay for the roads, bridges and transit changes needed to accommodate a project with the scale of Lincoln Yards. But many residents validly question why Sterling Bay can’t shoulder more of the cost of infrastructure improvements that will end up benefiting Lincoln Yards.

What Hopkins, Emanuel, City Hall and Sterling Bay need to remember is that community input made the Lincoln Yards project better. It’s not perfect yet, but strides have been made precisely because city officials listened to, and reacted to, residents who must live with the impact of the development. That process of improvement can continue, provided residents have the opportunity to weigh in once more.

When City Hall rubber-stamps projects that will forever change communities, the city loses. Hopkins recently told the Tribune that, even after the Plan Commission vote, he could stop City Hall deliberations on Lincoln Yards any time before it gets to the City Council for final approval. Alderman, it’s time to halt the conveyor, and let residents speak up.